It doesn’t seem all that long ago that Katy Brand was a regular on our TV screens with her incredibly well crafted parodies of singers such as Lily Allen or the late Amy Winehouse. The reality of course is that this was 10 years ago and the game has very much moved on.

Katy Brand returned to the Fringe in 2016 and although I didn’t get to see the show I had heard good things. These rumblings – as well as a handy time slot – made me think that this show was well worth a punt.

We filed in to the sounds of David Bowie’s Space Oddity (what else?!) and Katy was greeted with warm applause. The opening monologue was as well crafted and confidently delivered as you could expect from a clown of this standing and the show started solidly as Katy introduced books from her childhood depicting their view of space and space travel after the year 2000.

We then ventured into jokes about time travel (including a cameo gag featuring a famous keyboard player) and the reality that Katy really couldn’t have been an astronaut… It was at this point that things started to go a little bit askew.

That’s not to say that the intentions of the second half weren’t noble: a routine about gender equality in children made some unarguable points about how kids should be allowed to aspire to be anything they want to be. But the jokes dried up and were reduced to repeated photo-based  gags about adding Star Wars t-shirts to the girls section of a department store.

This felt like two separate shows awkwardly thrown together in order to fill out the one-hour show slot. That may seem harsh but I have to expect more from a comedian who has risen to the status of having her own TV show.

This show was solid, nice, vanilla… though it felt like a ‘fun-size’ version of a Lucy Porter show. But honestly, how many of us would choose the ‘fun-size’ version of anything?

Clown Stars: * * *

 @Pleasance Above, Edinburgh